Days Are Numbers, The Traveler
by FiveForFighting09
Summary: Tony receives some bad news, makes a impulsive decision, and starts a journey to figure out what it means to be okay. Set after Truth or Consequences or the one where they rescued Ziva. One-shot.


**A/N: A one-shot that demanded to be written after I re-watched the Season 7 premiere. I couldn't stop it. Really, I couldn't. Oh, and slight death ahead, though its a side character, not a main one. **

* * *

><p>Tony has been home five hours, thirty seven minutes, twenty six seconds when he opens his mail. There is a stack of it on the floor of his house because in the neighborhood he lives in, has been living in since he had a mid-life crisis the year after he got back from Agent Afloat and bought a house, the mailman likes Tony and always puts the mail in the slot of his front door instead of the little holder for it outside. It would pile up there, he told Tony once, and that one of the things thieves look for when casing a home.<p>

The mailman tells Tony this with a serious expression and only later does the mailman, whose name is Rick, find out that Tony is a cop, or at least something like a cop.

The house, which Tony loves to death but sometimes can't stand the fact of owning something like it, is in a nice neighborhood, the kind where children play outside and all the neighbors are nosy enough to try and know everything about everyone. It's in Virginia, about a half hour away from DC. Tony couldn't afford anything closer to the city and the houses he could afford didn't have a big enough yard for the dog he wanted.

He never got the dog though and the house, which is much more like town house anyway, is nice but now, looking at the mail that had been sitting on his floor since he left to go avenge Ziva, is now in his hands. Most of it is junk, the kind of junk he never got when he lived in a small apartment, and Tony almost looses all patience with the pile.

Almost.

There, on the bottom of the pile, underneath all the crap and bills and stuff Tony doesn't even want to look at, is a small envelope, thick and dated the day Tony left for his suicide mission to avenge the memory of someone that had use to care for him.

The envelope is from somewhere in Europe, Italy Tony sees moments later, and the letter inside is written in familiar Italian, something that Tony hasn't seen since he visited his uncle seven years ago in New York City.

Tony walks to the kitchen and kicks off his shoes and he reads the letter, and somewhere around the fifth or sixth sentence, his brain remembers what the words mean, like actually mean to his life and his soul, and Tony finds himself crying, sobbing in the empty house that he bought because he had been worried that if he got another apartment, he would go insane.

The bastard, he thinks of his father, as he reads the Italian faster now, his brain remembering how to think in his mother tongue.

Tony keeps crying through the whole letter, wondering what the man ever thought of him, and realizing that it doesn't really matter now.

The ending, which is in English, throws him for such a loop Tony about falls off the chair from laughing so hard.

Rich. His father had died a multi-millionaire and his dying wish had been to leave everything, _everything,_ to his one and only son.

Tony kept laughing well into the night and somewhere along the way, all his alcohol had somehow managed to find its way onto the small kitchen table and into his stomach.

The next morning, Tony wakes up and regrets ever living through the hell that was Africa before he pukes for about three hours straight. The worse thing about living alone is that no one was gonna help you clean up your crap. And since Tony has been alone since his eight birthday, he figures he might as well get started.

Picking up the bottles, Tony catches a glimpse of the letter that is now stained with rings of condensation, the water blurring the edges of the small print but not erasing the words completely.

Sometime after that, after Tony has promptly sobbed himself into a near coma, Tony hears the phone ring.

"Someone better be dead DiNozzo," Gibbs grumbles on the other line when Tony finally remembers that he still has a job and a life outside his hollowed home.

"My dad's dead," Tony says before hanging up on Gibbs. He turns his cell phone off, okay, he throws his cell phone against the wall before walking over and stepping on it a few times. He doesn't know why he is suddenly angry, angry at his father for dying across the sea, angry at Ziva for leaving and dying even though she was really alive the whole time, and angry at Gibbs, who didn't even bother to call and ask if he was okay, if something was _wrong_, so wrong that Tony wouldn't even show up for work.

The anger quickly dissipates when he realizes that none of them have been to his new home. That Gibbs is probably driving over right now to his old apartment, and won't it just rile him up all that more when he finds out that Tony hasn't lived there in months? Or has it been years?

How long has it been since Jenny died? Since Kate died? When had the seasons of his life passed him buy so quickly that he lost track of the number of years he had been working as an NCIS agent? When had he become the kind of person who let himself be drowned by self-pity?

This was a whole lot easier when he left everything every two years.

Picking up the rest of his mail, Tony throws it in the trash, all except for the one letter that started all this. He heads up stairs. He might miss the rosary but if Tony knows anything about his family, he knows that they wouldn't dare have the funeral without him.

And he has a plane to catch.

* * *

><p>He writes an email to McGee and tells him the bare minimum.<p>

_Dad's dead, going to Italy to pay my respects. Will be back in a week or so._

He doesn't give concrete details because he knows it won't matter anyway. McGee has no doubt already found the airline ticket Tony purchased this morning and since McGee is not as dense as Tony likes to pretend he is, he will no doubt relay the information to Gibbs, who is probably near anger explosion since Tony is not answering the phone that he threw against the wall.

He calls the office and is surprised when the Director actually picks the phone up after Vance's secretary transfers him through.

"Yes DiNozzo?"

"You know that time off you offered me? I think I might need to take some of it."

Tony can almost feel the scowl on the Director's face.

"Any particular reason other than coming back from your mission DiNozzo?"

"My um, my dad died a week ago sir."

It is quiet on the other end for a long time and for a few seconds, Tony fears that the Director has hung up on him. That is, until the Director speaks.

"You take all the time you need Tony, and my condolences."

The rest of the conversation is quick and painless and by the time Tony hangs up the phone, he wonders if that was the first time the Director has ever called him by his first name.

* * *

><p>He buys a pre-paid phone from a counter in the airport and calls his uncle before he boards the plane. His uncle is mildly drunk, which is about right considering it late in the night over in Italy, and he speaks with such a thick accent that Tony has to get his Uncle to give the phone to his Aunt so he can understand what's going on.<p>

The funeral is in two days, his Aunt tells him. They have waited as long as they could and since DiNozzo Sr. didn't have anything other than his son's address, they had hoped the mail would get to him in time. Tony almost tells his Aunt that he had been out on a suicide mission, the kind that someone did when they were madly in love or just plain mad, but he stops himself when he hears the way his Aunt's breath still catches when she mentions his father who was her favorite brother.

"I'll be there soon," is all he can promise and even as the words leave his mouth, he doesn't know why he said them, doesn't know why he bothered to help a situation that cannot be fixed.

* * *

><p>Hours later, Tony lands in the place he has not been to since he was a senior in high school and had had his whole life of playing professional ball mapped out for him. The memory of that feeling burns Tony for some reason that he can't explain and he thinks about the family he hasn't seen since he was here last. It's hot (the city not the memory), like the rest of the northern hemisphere, and Tony wonders why he misses summer so much in the winter when all it brings is humidity and enough heat to bake him inside out.<p>

A cousin that Tony has only talked to on the phone is the one that picks him up and take him to the DiNozzo house.

By the time Tony walks in through the front door, he is exhausted enough to only to give his Aunt his best kinda hug and say goodnight to his family, though it is now early in the morning and everyone is preparing for the funeral of the eldest son of the DiNozzo family.

Tony sleeps for a whole day straight and not one soul comes and bothers him.

During that whole time, Tony has only one nightmare of Gibbs' ghost crossing the Atlantic Ocean to strangle him for not answering the phone he broke and slammed into the wall back at his house.

It scares him enough that he sends a quick email to McGee.

_Made it to the relatives house. Funeral in a couple of days. Talk to you soon._

He hits sends before quickly trying to go back to sleep.

It is only hours later when he is helping his family with the final preparations that he realizes he sent the email message in Italian.

* * *

><p>Two days after the day Tony buries the last parent he will ever have, Tony meets with his father's financial advisor guy. Tony wants no part in running a business and when push comes to shove, Tony has no problem leaving the hotel chain or whatever else DiNozzo Sr. had in the very capable hands of his two uncles and Aunt, all of whom have been wonderful and loving during the whole time Tony has been in this country. He wonders if his team will ever believe that he gave up a multi-million dollar company but then again, he was never about the money anyhow.<p>

Tony realizes quickly though that his family is still quick to share and despite his protest, they manage to convince him to hold a few hundred thousand dollars worth of shares in the company.

Not only that but his father's fortune, apart from the company, makes Tony wonder if his father had died from a heart attack as opposed to the aneurysm everyone kept saying had killed him.

Because looking at all those zeros had almost made Tony die and all he had to worry about was his plague scared lungs, not a faulty blood vessel in his brain.

The negotiations take days, so many that Tony doesn't even keep track of them, and the next time Tony looks at a date or a calendar he realizes with great dread that it has been over three weeks since he's left DC.

_Taking care of loose ends. Will make it back as soon as I can._

Tony sends the email to Ducky now (he makes sure it is in English this time), taking the cowards way out. He does not want his team involved in what's happening, and that realization makes something in Tony's chest go _clank, _that for a moment, he wonders if he really is suffering from a heart attack.

But a few hours later, when Tony checks his email again, Ducky has responded in the only way Ducky can, with kind words, hopes, and a story that Tony reads all the way through just for the heck of it, before reading it again and imagining the ME's voice tell the story in its entirety without having to worry about people walking out or interrupting him.

* * *

><p>Tony calls the Director a month and four days after leaving DC and NCIS and asks if he can use up all of his vacation and unpaid leave.<p>

The total adds up to a depressingly large number and Tony wonders why he never looked into getting compensated for the time he had never taken off back when he actually had places he wanted to go.

The idea sticks with him for two more days of waking up and just being around people who have known him for years and years and it makes Tony's stomach do a weird flip when he realizes that he is forty, which is two score or four decades and it leaves him feeling more depressed and out of sync with life, more than he even felt when he sat in his desk all summer and watched as the days go by, days where he thought Ziva was dead and he had killed her and nothing he did could change anything.

"I think I want to go," he tells his Aunt one morning when she is making breakfast for him and all the workers who are going to come today to work on the vineyard.

"Go where?" she tells him in her soft spoken Italian. Tony loves her voice most of all and knows that if his mom had been Italian instead of English, that she would have sounded exactly like his Aunt.

"I don't know," Tony replies.

"Ah," his Aunt says with a small smile on her lips and a twinkle in her eye, "Those are the best kind of trips."

* * *

><p>Tony stays in Italy with his Aunt and uncles and cousins until all his leave and vacation time almost runs out. He has two weeks left when he buys a plane ticket to the first place that catches his eye and calls the Director.<p>

"I quit," Tony says and wonders briefly if Vance will rejoice at those two words.

"I see," is all Vance says for the longest time before Tony starts talking about being forty and being an orphan technically, and about partners and guns and how he had never liked DC winters anyway.

He's rambling he knows but he has long past the point of caring whether or not he makes sense to anyone so he stops short just before he tells Vance how his mother looked the day she died.

"I'm going on a trip," is what he finishes with instead and he leaves the phone connection open for a few more seconds.

"Where too?" is all Vance asks.

"I don't know," is all Tony can say before he hangs up the phone and throws it against the wall.

He should take a class or something, he briefly thinks after his Aunt comes in and smacks him with the broom for scaring here with the crash. Throwing phones is not something that most people would consider normal or totally healthy.

But later as Tony buys the first of many postcards and write two quick letters on each of them, he decides he doesn't care about that either.

* * *

><p>Somewhere in England, Tony checks his email for the last time.<p>

It is filled with messages, all of which Tony will not read, except for one that catches his eye. It is from Gibbs and Tony gathers enough courage to click on it before he breaks out in a cold sweat and deletes it off his inbox without looking at anything other than the first two words that said:

_I'm sorry._

* * *

><p>Tony starts sending two postcards everywhere he goes. One for Abby and one more McGee. One when he arrives in a new place and one when he leaves, though they are never off the exact same place and Tony wonders what he would do if McGee figured out a way to mathematically estimate where Tony was going to pop up next and appear there.<p>

He finds that silly all of a sudden. It's been four months since he left NCIS and DC and he knows by now Gibbs has found another Senior Field Agent, just like he found Tony after Stan had left.

He hopes, with almost all his being, that somehow or another Ziva found a way to join the team again and that Probie is sitting at his desk, eating those stupid Nutter Butters and picking sprinkles off his donuts.

And he hopes one day they can forgive him for leaving the way he did, though he knows that probably won't happen because he still hasn't forgiven himself either.

* * *

><p>He spends a month in Australia, escaping the cold temps of the north and it isn't until mid-March that he pokes his head out of the sandy beach long enough to buy a plane ticket back to Italy to check on his family, especially his Aunt.<p>

The business is running smoothly and Tony, despite the fact that he never wanted to go into business, knows enough about how money works to spend just enough to live off the interest of all the money he has acquired so that each month, he is never ahead or behind in the amount he owns.

Which is funny, he thinks, considering that's how he's felt since the day he found out Ziva had died when she had really been alive all along.

* * *

><p>Almost ten months traveling the world, Tony lands in a town on the border of Mexico and the United States of America. He had started somewhere in South America and had traveled his way north, cursing the fact that the world wasn't big enough to run away from his problems for forever.<p>

The town, which is really a city wrapped around the end of the Rocky Mountains, is called El Paso, Texas and Tony finally finds _something_ that makes him stop and stare and look.

He does not want to travel anywhere else in the USA, not to California where Jenny died nor to the East Coast where Kate died. Instead, Tony wants to stay right where he is, which is a city that is in the middle of the desert, in a landlocked area of the nation, where there is no more water and just the right amount of people to sit and stand relatively still for more than a few months at a time.

He bounces around for awhile, always using money to stay on one side of the town then the other, before he leaves El Paso and rents a small apartment thirty miles outside the city limits in a town called Fabens.

The town is a farming town, with a mixture of all sorts of ethnic groups, and Tony finds himself speaking and thinking in Spanish much more often than he does English.

One day, when Tony is crossing the street because he hasn't bought a car and he missed to bus back to town, he watches and see a young boy run out into the street following a soccer ball.

Which wouldn't be a bad thing really, if a truck wasn't coming down the same road.

He runs, like he use to do when he chased scumbags or when he had the football in his hands, and he makes it to the boy just in time to get clipped by the truck.

The boy is fine, Tony finds out later, and so is he though he will be incredibly sore for the few weeks.

The boy's mother, in her gratefulness, finds out that he is living in a rundown shack that use to be a trailer and offers her father's house for him to stay. He has a room to rent and Tony likes the older man well enough, he's seen Leo Campos around the town enough to know he's a good man, and Tony spends the next few weeks hobbling around like an old man while the boy he saved, Diego, and his brother Mario try and teach him the finer points of soccer.

When Tony can move again, Leo offers him a job.

"You every worked with animals before?"

"No."

"You ever had a real job before?"

"I was a cop."

"Good. I like a man that can handle a gun."

* * *

><p>Tony stays in El Paso for another two months before anything major happens other than almost getting run over by a truck.<p>

Of course, it was bound to happen sooner or later and Tony thinks it's stupid of him to think he could stay running for so long without it happening. Tony of course, isn't counting the fact that he is dating a single mother with two kids as anything major. Because after the last past couple of months, dealing with two boys who seem to have immeasurable amounts of energy is a piece of cake.

But one day, when Tony is back at Mr. Campos' work, checking on all the dogs and cats in the kennels, a knock comes on the side-door.

Leo, who was expecting a shipment of de-worming shots for horses or something along those lines, tells Tony to answer the door.

Tony does and his brain thinks its short circuited when he sees Gibbs standing there. Of course, everything comes right back online when he former boss decks him hard enough for him to see stars.

The only satisfaction in the whole thing is that Leo, despite being slightly older than Gibbs most likely, punches Gibbs hard enough to knock the wind out of him before Leo grabs the shot gun and almost puts a round in Gibbs' head.

The whole things would be really funny too, if Tony wasn't on the ground crying like a little kid.

* * *

><p>It's been a year since Tony left NCIS and DC and suddenly he comes back to awareness with Leo and Gibbs standing over him. Miriam is standing over him too, and he can feel her small hand in his sweaty one, can feel the lack of calluses in her beautiful, graceful hands and holds on tightly, not wanting to let go. Her eyes are milky brown and her hair is dark enough to remind him of the night, and Tony tries to take a picture of her, tries to remember what she looks like at this moment in time.<p>

He's in the emergency room at Sierra Providence Hospital, the closes hospital from the animal clinic in Fabens, and he's doped up on so many drugs that he's pretty sure McGee, Abby and Ziva are there in his room too.

"I think I ran in circles 'oss," Tony says to Leo though Gibbs responds instead.

"The earth is round last time I checked DiNozzo."

"No one's called me that in a long time," is the last thing Tony says before a nurse comes in and gives him a look and says something that makes Tony wonder if he is suddenly Charlie Brown and can't understand a word that the grownups are saying.

* * *

><p>Tony comes back fully this time in enough pain that he wonders if Leo finally lost it and smacked him with the wrench that he always threatened he would, but the fight, or the punch, comes back with sudden clarity that Tony winces just thinking about it.<p>

Miriam is there when he wakes up, and his heart lurches in his chest for a reason beyond him when he sees tears running down her face.

Mario and Diego, her two boys who have somehow become his too, are sitting in the chairs next to hers, and Tony can hear their softly spoken Spanish over the beeping of all the monitors in his room.

"I think Gibbs broken my jaw," Tony tries, or wants to say, but the minute he makes any movement to speak his brain is wracked with a new kind of pain, one that he hasn't felt since he got sucker punched his first day as a cop.

"Tony," Miriam says and wipes his brow, "You're jaws broken so you might not want to talk for awhile."

Tony wants to make some comment about that but he sighs and wiggles his fingers in Miriam's hands, hoping she can understand the fact that he wishes that movement would mean something important.

"I love you too," is all she says and Tony is struck by the fact that the phrase makes him sad because he wishes he could speak the words too.

* * *

><p>He spends another two days in the hospital before they release him with strict instructions on how to take care of the metal cage that is keeping his jaw closed so that it can heal. Miriam promises to only make food that actually sounds good blended and since nothing sounds good blended, Tony is determined that he will most certainly starve to death by the end of the month when he is suppose to go back to see if he can have the metal cage removed.<p>

He has not seen Gibbs since that day in the ER, which was also the day the older man punched him hard enough to break his jaw, and he wonders all of a sudden what happened to him and if Leo really did go out into the desert and kill the man that had hit his future son-in-law.

Obviously not, Tony sees, when Miriam takes him home.

Gibbs is sitting in the living room when he walks in, chipping away at a piece of wood with his knife, and Tony decides not to call attention to Leo, who is reading the newspaper in his easy chair with the shot gun still crossed over his lap.

Some things are just better left unsaid.

* * *

><p>A year and a month after Tony left NCIS to burry his father in Italy, Tony walks through the doors of NCIS. His jaw is still wired shut (which caused a few problems going through airport security) so when he smiles at McGee, the man does the sort of double take one does when one catches sight of a serial killer.<p>

"Tony?" McGee asks and makes a motion to sit. He stands right back up though, when Ziva walks into the bullpen, having returned from either the break room or the head.

"Tony," Ziva says his name, just like Tim, but unlike Tim it is not a question and this more than anything makes Tony glad, in a heart squeezing kind of way, that he went on a suicide mission to bring back the ghost of someone he had once loved and had ended up bring back an actual someone.

"Gibbs broke my jaw," Tony says, the words muffled from not being able to open his mouth. But he read somewhere that it was the tongue and lips that created your words anyway so he wasn't too worried about them understanding.

"He-" both open their mouths to ask but just then the elevator dings again and his family walks though.

"So, I figured it was time for a visit," Tony smiles, or tries to, but the smile turns into a frown, at least until he breaks eye contact with them and looks at Miriam, Leo, Diego and Mario.

"So," Tony continues, "We came for a visit."

* * *

><p>He stays for a week. It's the longest Leo and he can be gone without the whole clinic deteriorating into chaos. Mario and Diego love Ducky and Abby, like Tony knew they would, and Leo actually acquires a fondness for McGee and Jimmy that surprises him.<p>

Miriam is the only one that strikes up a friendship with Ziva.

When they all finally have to say goodbye, the whole team is there, at the checkpoint right before security, and Abby is already crying although Tony would rather have that then angry, which she had been when he had first walked into her room.

But now sadness fills the whole group and Tony tries to shake it off like he did last time, but last time he hadn't seen their faces when he left and he made sure to keep enough distance between them to never have to, and he's about ready to gently tug his family through the gate and into the part of the airport that his former team can't follow. Because he's never been so good with goodbye.

"Here," McGee says in the silence, "If you…if you travel again, I figured you want something like this."

It's a translator, the kind that is electronic and has over 200 languages programmed on it, and Tony can see the little marks that tell him McGee made it himself, for him.

Tony takes the gift and offers a hug in return, with the promise of mailing McSweet Tooth some delicious Mexican candy when he gets home.

Next is Abby, who hugs him again and starts to cry again, but Tony knows that next time they see each other, which will be this Thanksgiving Abby has already promised, won't be as bad as this meeting. He has promised to keep in touch and since Diego is a whiz with the computer, he has already promised Abby to help Tony set up a Sky or a Scape or whatever that site was that allowed for video chatting.

Next are Ducky and Jimmy, which go smoothly. And considering Gibbs is _getting_ on the plane with them, Tony skips the gruff man and stops in front of the last person in their little farewell party.

"I wish you would have stayed," Ziva whispers into Tony's hug, "I wish you would have let me apologize."

"I never needed you too," Tony offers his forgiveness in those words.

"Then why did you leave?"

"Because it didn't make a difference," Tony replies quietly, "You were safe and alive and everything should have been better, but it wasn't. I still felt stuck. And then I went to Italy and…it was easier to trick myself into feeling as if I was moving forward if I never stayed anywhere, if I never came back here."

"What changed?" Ziva asks now that their last hug is over. They are not stupid. They know that it will never be the same as it was and that fact alone hurts them both suddenly, as if they are mourning the loss of the friendship that crumbled the day Tony fired the first shot that made Ziva doubt his loyalty.

"Me," Tony smiles as best he can.

The words do not heal the hurt. The hurt had healed many months ago, on their own and because of that, they scared, leaving behind a reminder that will stay with each of them for the rest of their days, the scars of broken bones, guns and of partners that somehow lost their way.

And Tony is okay with that. Because one year, one month and twelve days ago, Tony was stuck watching the world go around and around while he moved in place, never gaining or losing ground.

And now, for the first time since Tony boarded his first plane to Italy, he was finally traveling towards home.

And that feeling was the best in the world.


End file.
